DOCSLIB.ORG

Parchman Farm Penitentiary Exists As Modern Day Slavery

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Parchman Farm Penitentiary Exists As Modern Day Slavery Providence College DigitalCommons@Providence Annual Undergraduate Conference on Health Twelfth Annual Undergraduate Conference on and Society Health and Society (2021) Apr 23rd, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM Parchman Farm Penitentiary Exists as Modern Day Slavery Savannah Plaisted Providence College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/auchs Part of the Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons, and the Sociology Commons Plaisted, Savannah, "Parchman Farm Penitentiary Exists as Modern Day Slavery" (2021). Annual Undergraduate Conference on Health and Society. 1. https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/auchs/2021/panel3/1 This Event is brought to you for free and open access by the Conferences & Events at DigitalCommons@Providence. It has been accepted for inclusion in Annual Undergraduate Conference on Health and Society by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Providence. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Parchman Farm Penitentiary Exists as Modern Day Slavery Savannah Plaisted December 16, 2020 Author: Savannah Plaisted Email: [email protected] Program: BA Political Science, Providence College Professor: Dr. Herron Course: Southern Politics Capstone Plaisted 2 Abstract This paper explores the connections between convict leasing in the state of Mississippi and the current state of prison labor at Parchman Farm Penitentiary (Mississippi State Penitentiary). The use of unpaid labor, the grossly disproportionate representation of Black men, the inhumane and grotesque conditions of the prison, the abnormally high death rate, and the continued execution of a disproportionate number of Black men of today’s Parchman Farm and the version of the prison at its initial founding in 1901 will be analyzed. All of these factors combined provide the foundation for the argument that slavery never ended in the state of Mississippi, and is perpetuated to this day through the institution of Parchman Farm Penitentiary. Introduction The state of Mississippi has been recognized for decades as a large proponent of states’ rights and of keeping with traditions. These two factors combined contributed to the state’s refusal to part with the institution of slavery even after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Mississippi, in conjunction with a number of other Southern states, worked to create a system of continued forced labor and the oppression of the Black race long after slavery had been abolished and the rights of freed Black men had been established by the ensuing civil rights amendments to the Constitution. The system these states utilized was that of the convict leasing system, which used the so-called “loophole”1 of the Thirteenth Amendment to re-enslave Black women and men under a different name. The Thirteenth Amendment reads “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The 1 Ewing, Adam. "In/visibility: Solitary Confinement, Race, and the Politics of Risk Management." Transition, no. 119 (2016): 109-23. 115. Plaisted 3 “loophole” refers to the clause “except as punishment for a crime,” as this allowed for states to use prison time as a means of slavery in a manner that was completely legal according to this language. Convict leasing was the first of many systems of oppression in the post-slavery era to utilize the Thirteenth Amendment “loophole.” Convict leasing refers to the system by which inmates were leased to private employers (farms, railroad construction, infrastructure construction, etc) to work off the debts or sentences that landed them in prison. This system was detrimental to the state of Mississippi’s racial climate, given that “From its beginning in Mississippi in the late 1860s until its abolition in Alabama in the late 1920s, convict leasing would serve to undermine legal equality, harden racial stereotypes, spur industrial development, intimidate free workers, and breed open contempt for the law.”2 This was a system that disproportionately affected Black Americans and had a death rate of roughly 45%.3 Convict leasing and the versions of it that came before it was legally considered such terminology originated in the state of Mississippi. Brett J. Derbes describes the timeline of this system, writing, “experiments in convict leasing began in Mississippi nearly three decades before the brutal system employed across the South during and after Reconstruction.”4 This system, simply put, served as “Slavery by Another Name,”5 and provided the foundation for exploited labor by prisons today. Douglas A. Blackmon expands on this point with his statement regarding convict leasing that it, “terrorized the larger black population into compliance with a social order in which they were willingly submitted to complete domination by 2 Oshinsky, David M. Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. Free Press, 1996. 56. 3 Ibid.. 60. 4 Derbes, Brett J. “Origins of the Prison-Industrial Complex,” Hild, Matthew, and Keri Leigh Merritt, eds. Reconsidering Southern Labor History : Race, Class, and Power. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2018. 47- 57. 50. 5 Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name : The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War Ii. First Anchor booksed. New York: Anchor Books, a division of Random House, 2009. 1. Plaisted 4 whites, and it significantly funded the operations of government by converting black forced labor into funds for the counties and states.”6 Mississippi state law in particular contributed greatly to the progression of the oppression of the Black race. In particular, the so-called “Pig Law” and the “Leasing Act”7 served to increase the prison population of Mississippi drastically, thereby increasing the number of convicts the state had the ability to lease to private employers. The “Pig Law” changed the legal definition of “grand larceny” so that any item stolen that was valued above $10 (roughly the price of a pig) would result in up to five years of prison time. Accordingly, the Leasing Act provided that prisoners could work outside of the prison—thereby allowing for prisoners to be leased to said employers. Mississippi also passed the Vagrant Law in 1865, which found free men with no employment at the beginning of a new year in violation of the law and subject to time in prison. It stated that, “Section 2 provides that all freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes in the State, over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or business,”8 are to be imprisoned accordingly. Each race described in this law received a different sentence or fine based solely upon their race. The state also had in place laws to prohibit Black people from drinking alcohol, possessing firearms, or speaking out against the government.9 Mississippi state law effectively put in place laws to keep free Black women and men at a second class status, with very clear discrepancies between laws imprisoning Black people and white people. The legal system in Mississippi and the racial caste system that came along with it 6 Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name : The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War Ii. First Anchor booksed. New York: Anchor Books, a division of Random House, 2009. 69. 7 Sturkey, William. "Race and Reconciliation on the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad." Southern Cultures 24, no. 4 (2018): 87-104. 91. 8 McPherson, Edward, Harold M Hyman, and Hans L Trefousse. The Political History of the United States of America during the Period of Reconstruction : April 15, 1865-July 15, 1870. Studies in American History and Government. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972. 30. 9 Ibid. 32. Plaisted 5 at the time were described as follows: “There were four kinds of law in Mississippi, whites liked to say: statute law, plantation law, lynch law, and Negro law.”10 Accordingly, a number of years after convict leasing was abolished completely, the state of Mississippi established the State Sovereignty Commission in 1956, which referred to itself as being an institution that would protect Mississippi’s sovereignty from being breached by the federal government.11 In reality however, this institution was actually created in order to protect segregation laws and ensure that progress on civil rights was not made in the state. With that, the state of Mississippi itself has long stood as a “traditional” and with that, segregated and oppressive state. Parchman Farm Penitentiary opened its doors in 1901 and was largely built by the prisoners themselves. This state prison remains one of the most notoriously inhumane institutions and has consistently maintained a population that is majority Black. “According to the state penitentiary report of 1917, blacks comprised about 90 percent of the prison population.”12 The Governor of Mississippi that the prison was opened under, James K. Vardaman, referred to Parchman as running “like an effective slave plantation.”13 Not only were the prisoners severely beaten when they were not working hard enough or the guards needed a source of entertainment, they were also given little to eat, drink, and wear. Corporal punishment at Parchman in this early era of the institution came in the form of “Black Annie,” which was “a leather strap, three feet long and six inches wide.”14 Whippings with Black Annie were commonplace at this time as a form of 10 Oshinsky, David M. Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. Free Press, 1996. 124. 11 Katagiri, Yasuhiro. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission : Civil Rights and States' Rights. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. 3. 12 Oshinsky, David M. Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. Free Press, 1996. 137. 13 Winter, Margaret, and Stephen F.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice
    Georgetown University Law Center Scholarship @ GEORGETOWN LAW 2015 Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice Allegra M. McLeod Georgetown University Law Center, [email protected] This paper can be downloaded free of charge from: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/1490 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2625217 62 UCLA L. Rev. 1156-1239 (2015) This open-access article is brought to you by the Georgetown Law Library. Posted with permission of the author. Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub Part of the Criminal Law Commons, Criminal Procedure Commons, Criminology Commons, and the Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice Allegra M. McLeod EVIEW R ABSTRACT This Article introduces to legal scholarship the first sustained discussion of prison LA LAW LA LAW C abolition and what I will call a “prison abolitionist ethic.” Prisons and punitive policing U produce tremendous brutality, violence, racial stratification, ideological rigidity, despair, and waste. Meanwhile, incarceration and prison-backed policing neither redress nor repair the very sorts of harms they are supposed to address—interpersonal violence, addiction, mental illness, and sexual abuse, among others. Yet despite persistent and increasing recognition of the deep problems that attend U.S. incarceration and prison- backed policing, criminal law scholarship has largely failed to consider how the goals of criminal law—principally deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retributive justice—might be pursued by means entirely apart from criminal law enforcement. Abandoning prison-backed punishment and punitive policing remains generally unfathomable. This Article argues that the general reluctance to engage seriously an abolitionist framework represents a failure of moral, legal, and political imagination.
    [Show full text]
  • Phasing out Our Use of Private Prisons | OPA | Department of Justice
    10/7/2016 Phasing Out Our Use of Private Prisons | OPA | Department of Justice PHASING OUT OUR USE OF PRIVATE PRISONS August 18, 2016 Courtesy of Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates When most people think of the Justice Department, they are likely to imagine the most visible parts of our job – the law enforcement agents who investigate crimes or the lawyers who prosecute them. But the department’s core responsibilities go beyond investigation and prosecution. Unlike most states, the federal government puts its law enforcement agents, criminal prosecutors, and correctional officers all in a single department. We handle every step from the start of an investigation to the end of a prison sentence. Our work to house and rehabilitate individuals incarcerated in the Federal Bureau of Prisons is an important part of our responsibility and operations, accounting for 25 percent of the department’s budget every year. The federal prison population increased by almost 800 percent between 1980 and 2013, often at a far faster rate than the Bureau of Prisons could accommodate in their own facilities. In an effort to manage the rising prison population, about a decade ago, the bureau began contracting with privately operated correctional institutions to confine some federal inmates. By 2013, as both the federal prison population and the proportion of federal prisoners in private facilities reached their peak, the bureau was housing approximately 15 percent of its population, or nearly 30,000 inmates, in privately operated prisons. 2013 was also the year that the Department of Justice launched its Smart on Crime Initiative after identifying reforms that would ensure more proportional sentences and effective use of federal resources.
    [Show full text]
  • Coming out of Concrete Closets
    COMING OUT OF CONCRETE CLOSETS A REPORT ON BLACK & PINK’S NATIONAL LGBTQ PRISONER SURVEY To increase the power of prisoners we need greater access to the Jason Lydon political process. We need real! access to real people in real power with who will actively hear us and help us, not just give us lip service, come Kamaria Carrington sit and talk with me, help me take my dreams and present them to Hana Low the people who can turn them into a reality, I am not persona non Reed Miller grata, hear me, don't patronize me just to keep me quiet, understand that I'm very capable of helping in this fight. ‐Survey respondent Mahsa Yazdy 1 Black & Pink October 2015 www.blackandpink.org This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Version 2, 10.21.2015 Cover image: “Alcatraz” by Mike Shelby / CC BY 2.0 , 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS Executive Summary .................................................................................................................................................... 3 Key Findings ............................................................................................................................................................ 3 Recommendations ..................................................................................................................................................... 6 Policing and Criminalization of LGBTQ People ....................................................................................................... 6 Courts / Bail Reform /
    [Show full text]
  • UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO the Penitentiary at Richmond
    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO The Penitentiary at Richmond: Slavery, State Building, and Labor in the South’s First State Prison A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in History by Hilary Louise Coulson Committee in charge: Professor Rebecca Jo Plant, Chair Professor Stephen D. Cox Professor Mark Hanna Professor Mark Hendrickson Professor Rachel Klein 2016 Copyright Hilary Louise Coulson, 2016 All Rights Reserved The Dissertation of Hilary Louise Coulson is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ Chair University of California, San Diego 2016 iii DEDICATION For my parents, Richard and Laura Coulson who always believed I could, and for my husband, Frank Fernandez, who helped me prove it. iv EPIGRAPH “You know we don’t have our prisons like yours of the North, like grand palaces with flower-yards.” –Keeper of the Virginia Penitentiary, c. 1866 v TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page ............................................................................................... iii Dedication ......................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Educator Pedagogical Approach Shedding Light on Solitary Confinement Moya Atkinson, MSW May 2020
    Q&A: Educator Pedagogical Approach Shedding Light on Solitary Confinement Moya Atkinson, MSW May 2020 What approach to teaching about solitary confinement, and incarceration more broadly, do you recommend? The most powerful teaching approach is experiential, namely involvement in relevant activities coupled with reflection. Following are some learning opportunities for students that we recommend. Involvement and Observation 1. Witness the prison environment. Take part in a correctional facility tour: visit a prison, jail, or detention center. Some jails offer educational tours to college and university classes at the request of the professor. See, for example, information from the Orange County Corrections Department in Florida, and the Strafford County Department of Correction in New Hampshire. 2. Write letters to incarcerated people. See Letters from Solitary by Solitary Watch. Another excellent resource is the Prison and Justice Writing Program, which is part of PEN America, an organization that promotes the intersection of literature and human rights. Set up opportunities to interview returning citizens who were formerly incarcerated. 3. Experience solitary confinement virtually. The Guardian offers 6x9: A virtual experience of solitary confinement, which places you inside a U.S. solitary confinement prison cell. 4. Get involved in efforts by organizations that advocate for issues of solitary confinement and for the improvement of the justice system: Q&A: Educator Pedagogical Approach 2 American Civil Liberties Union The Vera Institute of Justice The Center for Constitutional Rights The Marshall Project (Abolition Resources) Prison Policy Initiative Center for Prison Reform (Explore their extensive list of organizations, including those for currently and formerly incarcerated people and for their families.) 5.
    [Show full text]
  • Treatment of American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1961-1973 by John N. Powers
    Treatment of American Prisoners of War In Southeast Asia 1961-1973 By John N. Powers The years 1961 to 1973 are commonly used when studying American POWs during the Vietnam War, even though history books generally refer to the years 1964 to 1973 in defining that war. Americans were captured as early as 1954 and as late as 1975. In these pages the years 1961 to 1973 will be used. Americans were held prisoner by the North Vietnamese in North Vietnam, the Viet Cong (and their political arm the National Liberation Front) in South Vietnam, and the Pathet Lao in Laos. This article will not discuss those Americans held in Cambodia and China. The Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) lists 687 American Prisoners of War who were returned alive by the Vietnamese from 1961 through 1976. Of this number, 72 were returned prior to the release of the bulk of the POWs in Operation Homecoming in 1973. Twelve of these early releases came from North Vietnam. DPMO figures list thirty-six successful escapes, thirty-four of them in South Vietnam and two in Laos. There were more than those thirty-six escapes, including some from prison camps in Hanoi itself. Some escapes ended in recapture within hours, some individuals were not recaptured for days, and some were simply never seen again. There were individuals who escaped multiple times, in both North and South Vietnam. However, only thirty- six American prisoners of war escaped and reached American forces. Of those thirty- six successful attempts, twenty-eight of them escaped within their first month of captivity.
    [Show full text]
  • The Continuing Use of Solitary Confinement Within the Context of International Human Rights, 47 J
    UIC Law Review Volume 47 Issue 4 Article 14 Summer 2014 ICE's New Policy on Segregation and the Continuing Use of Solitary Confinement within the Context of International Human Rights, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1433 (2014) Sarah Dávila-Ruhaak [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.uic.edu/lawreview Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, Immigration Law Commons, and the International Humanitarian Law Commons Recommended Citation Sarah Dávila-Ruhaak, ICE's New Policy on Segregation and the Continuing Use of Solitary Confinement within the Context of International Human Rights, 47 J. Marshall L. Rev. 1433 (2014) https://repository.law.uic.edu/lawreview/vol47/iss4/14 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UIC Law Open Access Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in UIC Law Review by an authorized administrator of UIC Law Open Access Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ICE’S NEW POLICY ON SEGREGATION AND THE CONTINUING USE OF SOLITARY CONFINEMENT WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS SARAH DÁVILA-RUHAAK I. Real Solitary ....................................................................... 14341432 II. Introduction........................................................................ 14321434 III. Solitary Confinem ent ......................................................... 14341436 A. Physical and psychological effects of solitary confinem ent............................................................
    [Show full text]
  • From Slave Ship to Supermax
    Introduction Antipanoptic Expressivity and the New Neo-Slave Novel As a slave, the social phenomenon that engages my whole con- sciousness is, of course, revolution. Anyone who passed the civil service examination yesterday can kill me today with complete immunity. I’ve lived with repression every moment of my life, a re- pression so formidable that any movement on my part can only bring relief, the respite of a small victory or the release of death.1 xactly 140 years after Nat Turner led a slave rebellion in southeastern Virginia, the U.S. carceral state attempted to silence another influential EBlack captive revolutionary: the imprisoned intellectual George Jackson. When guards at California’s San Quentin Prison shot Jackson to death on August 21, 1971, allegedly for attempting an escape, the acclaimed novelist James Baldwin responded with a prescience that would linger in the African American literary imagination: “No Black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.”2 Baldwin had long been an advocate for Jackson, and Jackson—as evident from his identification with the slave in the block quotation above—had long been a critic of social control practices in the criminal justice system reminiscent of slavery. Jackson was a well-read Black freedom fighter, political prisoner, Black Panther Party field marshal, and radical social theorist who organized a prisoners’ liberation movement while serving an indeterminate sentence of one year to life for his presumed complicity in a seventy-dollar gas station robbery. He first exposed slavery’s vestiges in the penal system in Soledad Brother, the collection of prison letters 2 Introduction he published in 1970.
    [Show full text]
  • Comparing Quality of Confinement in Private and Public Prisons Charles H
    Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology Volume 83 Article 4 Issue 3 Fall Fall 1992 Well Kept: Comparing Quality of Confinement in Private and Public Prisons Charles H. Logan Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc Part of the Criminal Law Commons, Criminology Commons, and the Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons Recommended Citation Charles H. Logan, Well Kept: Comparing Quality of Confinement in Private and Public Prisons, 83 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 577 (1992-1993) This Criminology is brought to you for free and open access by Northwestern University School of Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology by an authorized editor of Northwestern University School of Law Scholarly Commons. 0091-4169/92/8303-0577 THE JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL LAW & CRIMINOLOGY Vol. 83, No. 3 Copyright © 1992 by Northwestern University, School of Law Printedin U.S.A. WELL KEPT: COMPARING QUALITY OF CONFINEMENT IN PRIVATE AND PUBLIC PRISONS CHARLES H. LOGAN* [ABSTRACT] Quality of confinement is compared among three women's prisons: private, state, and federal. Defined along eight dimensions, quality of confinement is measured using 333 indicators derived from institu- tional records and surveys of inmates and staff. A comparative Prison Quality Index summarizes the results for each prison on each dimen- sion. While all three prisons are regarded as having been high in qual- ity, the private prison outperformed its governmental counterparts on nearly every dimension. I. INTRODUCTION InJuly 1988, the State of New Mexico awarded a contract to the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) to design, site, finance, construct and operate a 200-bed, multi-security level facility for the state's entire population of sentenced female felons.
    [Show full text]
  • ABSTRACT BITCHES and THIEVES: GULAG GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, and PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS in the BITCHES' WAR by Adam Richard
    ABSTRACT BITCHES AND THIEVES: GULAG GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, AND PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS IN THE BITCHES’ WAR by Adam Richard Rodger Amongst the professional criminals imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag, a split developed between those who kept to the Thieves’ Law and those who broke the Law and collaborated with the State. This violent schism, the Bitches’ War, raged across the entire Gulag system, becoming most heated between 1948 and 1953, and implicated the camps’ guards and administrators as much as the prisoners themselves. This research examines primary and secondary sources, heavily incorporating Gulag survivor memoirs, to investigate the culture of the Thieves-in-Law, these professional criminals, and also to uncover the involvement, intentions, and guilt of the camp administration. This study argues that the Bitches’ War sheds light on the real purpose and function of the Gulag; that it was not primarily about ideological re-education, nor was it primarily about economics and production, but that the Gulag served as a model for social control through use of power, persuasion, and violence. BITCHES AND THIEVES: GULAG GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, AND PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS IN THE BITCHES’ WAR Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of Master’s Degree by Adam Richard Rodger Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2017 Advisor: Dr. Stephen Norris Reader: Dr. Dan Prior Reader: Dr. Scott Kenworthy ©2017 Adam Richard Rodger This thesis titled BITCHES AND THIEVES GULAG GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, AND PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS IN THE BITCHES’ WAR by Adam Richard Rodger has been approved for publication by The College of Arts and Sciences and The Department of History ____________________________________________________ Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Colleen Tuite's Thesis.Pdf
    Tuite 1 Slavery to Mass Incarceration: The Evolution of a Racial Caste System ​ Colleen Tuite Public and Community Service Studies Senior Capstone Thesis Tuite 2 “How many have we lost? How many of us have been killed by whiteness? How many dead thrown into the sea or buried on plantations, hanged or burned alive, raped or jailed? How many millions upon millions? Can those lives be redeemed? Here in America? Around us is a nation taught to see us first as semi-animals, now criminals; it's a vision produced from social conflict where the very idea of crime is a political tool the elites use to hammer the poor.” 1 I. Introduction Known as the “Land of the Free”, the United States of America has the highest incarceration rate in the world. There are approximately 2.2 million people behind bars and an additional 4.5 million under community supervision.2 With the prison population having increased 700% in a 40 year period, despite crime rates barely fluctuating, one must wonder why our country relies so heavily on incarceration.3 Black individuals, especially Black men, are disproportionately represented in the prisons and jails across America as they are five times more likely to be incarcerated than their white male counterparts.4 Our country’s correctional facilities are used as a warehouse to cage these people and prevent them from participating in society. For a lot of people, especially those who are not harmed by the system, prisons seem like an inherent aspect of society needed to keep people safe.
    [Show full text]
  • The Psychological Effects of Solitary Confinement
    NIJ Update The Psychological Effects of Solitary Confinement By Philip Bulman study funded by the least once a month, and a librarian Having outsiders arrive in a closed National Institute of Jus- delivered books and magazines once a environment may affect the prisoners’ tice (NIJ) which examined week. Prisoners were allowed at least perceptions of the institutions in A the psychological effects one 20-minute phone call and one non- which they live, and the effects may of solitary confinement, known as contact visit each month. be larger for those in solitary confine- administrative segregation (AS) in cor- ment. Researchers arriving to inter- rections, showed that the mental view inmates is a major event in the health of most inmates did not decline monotonous routine of prison life, during the course of a year — con- especially for an inmate who is in iso- trary to the findings of some previous lation 23 hours a day. studies.1 Researchers assessed 247 Prisoners may be A related factor is the Hawthorne men in the Colorado prison system. placed in solitary effect, in which social and behavioral The sample included inmates in AS at researchers’ interactions with and the Colorado State Penitentiary and confinement, or AS, observation of subjects being studied two other groups for comparison: the affects the subject’s behavior. The general prison population and resi- for violent or name stems from a study of factory dents of San Carlos Correctional Facili- workers at Western Electric’s ty, a psychiatric care prison. The sam- disruptive behavior. Hawthorne plant in Illinois in the 1920s ple of inmates was divided into those and 1930s.
    [Show full text]